Month: February 2023

I wrote earlier about Speaker of the House Keven McCarthy “selling his soul to white supremacy” by granting Fox News star Tucker Carlson exclusive access to raw Capitol surveillance footage of the January 6 coup attempt. It now appears that McCarthy miscalculated how this would play with Republicans.

Rolling Stone reports that conservative media competitors are angry that they’ve been excluded and are preparing lawsuits. Hilariously, this includes Mike Lindell the Pillow Guy.

On Monday, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — a close Trump associate who has been one of the largest financial backers of the election-denialism movement since late 2020 — told Rolling Stone he’s now working with two attorneys, Doug Wardlow and Pat McSweeney, to file a lawsuit against McCarthy as soon as within the “next few days.” Lindell says he and his legal team have drafted a suit arguing his streaming program, Lindell TV, is being “injured” and discriminated against by not enjoying equal access to the unreleased Jan. 6 trove. The Trump ally, who often finds himself to the pro-Trump right of Fox News, notes that he doesn’t trust Fox’s “agenda” with these tapes, and dubs McCarthy’s decision “disgusting” and allegedly unconstitutional.

“As you correctly and publicly stated, the footage ‘belong[s] to the American public.’ Accordingly, I request the same access for my media company, Lindell TV,” the MyPillow CEO wrote to McCarthy in a Feb. 23 letter he provided to Rolling Stone. “Please have your staff reach out to me to arrange for access.”

The problem is that the base isn’t feeling very warmly about Fox News at the moment. Look no further than the revelation that owner Rupert Murdoch admitted in a Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit deposition that his on-air talent knowingly embraced the Big Lie that the 2020 election was rife with fraud that cost President Trump a second term in office. That caused an immediate meltdown by Trump on his Truth Social network.

“Why is Rupert Murdoch throwing his anchors under the table, which also happens to be killing his case and infuriating his viewers, who will again be leaving in droves—they already are.”

This is more than just conjecture on Trump’s part. The latest Fox News poll shows Trump on a glide path to the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, leading his nearest competitor Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, by 15 points.  The cable news outlet’s conservative viewers, like conservatives in general, still support Trump. And they have three other reasons to quit their Fox News habit.

For some, learning that the executives and talent at Fox News privately have contempt for both Trump and their own audience is a reason to leave. A few will be disturbed to learn that Fox News promoted lies about the 2020 election and look for more trustworthy sources, but more will probably seek out outlets that don’t contradict Trump. It was early evidence that this was happening that led Fox News to go along with Trump’s election lies leading up to the January 2021 coup attempt.

McCarthy probably thought Carlson was in good standing with the pro-Trump crowd, but that’s debatable. It’s now clear that Carlson sees them as “good people” but hopelessly stupid. He knew they would leave if the network contradicted Trump but mainly because they were gullible. He privately argued that Trump is “the undisputed world champion” of destroying things and could ruin Fox News if it didn’t back his election lies.

McCarthy probably overestimated how popular Carlson is with the MAGA crowd, and the same goes double for Carlson’s employer.

One problem with the release of January 6 footage to Carlson is that it could put members of Congress at greater risk, since it will show how they were evacuated and protected during the insurrection. This can be seen easily in how the House Republicans are treating a proposal to make the footage available to January 6 defendants.

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), who chairs the House Administration Committee’s oversight subpanel, said that the access for accused rioters and others — which Speaker Kevin McCarthy has greenlighted — would be granted on a “case-by-case basis.”

…“What gets released is obviously going to be scrutinized to make sure you’re not exposing any sensitive information that hasn’t already been exposed,” said Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.).

No such scrutiny preceded the access Carlson was provided. Now they’re trying to argue that they’ll pre-screen any footage Carlson intends to air so that there is no harm or foul here. I suppose that’s better than nothing.

These missteps have caused political and practical consternation within the House Republican caucus, as CNN reports:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy faced questions from his leadership team Monday night over his plans to publicly release security footage from January 6, 2021, multiple sources told CNN – a process that he said could take some time to disseminate widely even as Fox News host Tucker Carlson has had an early glimpse.

While GOP leaders are supportive of the move to release the footage – which was one of the many concessions McCarthy made in his bid to become speaker – some lawmakers in the closed-door leadership meeting asked whether sensitive security protocols or certain evacuation routes would be exposed by taking that step.

Others questioned how long the footage is going to be dragged out in the press, with some lawmakers concerned about the optics of appearing to try to downplay a deadly insurrection in the US Capitol.

“Let’s just rip the Band-aid off and get this over with,” one GOP lawmaker told CNN.

I think it’s safe to say that McCarthy’s decision to give the footage exclusively to Carlson without any pre-screening has flopped. The GOP is now trying to clean up the mess, but it sadly failed even where it should have succeeded. It hasn’t won good will from Trump’s supporters because they no longer trust Fox News.

 

Miriam Berger and Shira Rubin of the Washington Post report that all is not well in the West Bank.

HUWARA, West Bank — Dozens of Israeli settlers rampaged through Palestinian towns, torching cars, homes and killing a man, hours after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis.

The scenes from the hours-long rampage Sunday night bore the trademark of a once-active settler movement known as “price taggers,” whose mission was to extract a “price” for any Palestinian attacks or threats to the settler movement.

This a typical case of an escalating cycle of violence.

…a Palestinian gunman opened fire at a traffic junction in Huwara, south of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, killing Hillel Menachem Yaniv, 22, and Yagel Yaakov Yaniv, 20, brothers from the nearby Har Bracha settlement — likely itself a retaliation for an Israeli raid on Nablus the week before that killed 11 Palestinians, including militants and civilians.

About that raid in Nablus, it was at least partly retribution for “a shooting that killed an Israeli soldier near the illegal settlement of Shavei Shomron in October,” and was “the third major Israeli operation in the West Bank since the start of the year.”

At least 150 Israeli soldiers in dozens of armoured vehicles swooped on Nablus on Wednesday in what turned out to be one of the deadliest military raids in the occupied West Bank since the mass Palestinian uprising or Intifada of 2000-05.

Within four hours, the Israeli army killed 11 Palestinians and injured more than 80 people with live ammunition – some of them critically. The raid comes barely a month after 10 Palestinians were killed in a similar raid in the Jenin refugee camp about 41km (25 miles) away.

The Jenin raid was allegedly a preemptive attack or, as U.S. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel put it, “a counterterrorism operation.”

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its troops entered Jenin to arrest an Islamic Jihad “terror squad”, who it accused of being “heavily involved in planning and executing multiple major terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians and soldiers”.

Sometimes the explanations for these massacres are a bit more candid:

“A Huwara that is burning — that’s the only way we’ll achieve deterrence,” Tzvika Foghel, a lawmaker from the far right Jewish Power party, told Galei Israel radio the next day. “We need to stop shying away from collective punishment.”

I must pause here to note that collective punishment is banned under the Geneva Conventions and international law.

All this violence served as the backdrop of a meeting on Sunday in Jordan between representatives of Israel and Palestine intended to stop the escalating cycle of violence.

The Jordanian government on Sunday announced that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to de-escalate tensions, shortly after a Palestinian gunman killed two Israelis in a shooting in the occupied West Bank.

Sunday’s shooting marked the latest violence in a wave of fighting that has killed dozens of Israelis and Palestinians over the past year. Jordan invited the sides with the aim of reducing tensions ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

A statement from Jordan’s Foreign Ministry said that the Israeli and Palestinian representatives agreed to work toward a “just and lasting peace” and affirmed the need to “commit to de-escalation on the ground.”

It said they had agreed to preserve the status quo at a contested Jerusalem holy site, and that Israel had agreed to halt new settlement approvals in the occupied West Bank for four to six months. It also said both sides agreed to support “confidence-building steps” and to meet again next month in Egypt.

But there’s really little reason to believe these promises will be kept by either side. More typical of the far right Israeli government’s attitude are statements like these:

Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the Religious Zionist Party, the third-largest bloc in the coalition, said that he had “no idea” about the discussions at the “unnecessary conference” in Jordan, but that Israel would not agree to a settlement freeze, “even for one day.”…Smotrich…called for “striking the cities of terror and its instigators without mercy, with tanks and helicopters, in a way that conveys that the master of the house has gone crazy.”

Unsurprisingly, the posture of the Israeli government causes consternation among many non-Israeli Jews, including here in the Americas.

Total perversion of Judaism and Jewish identity.
American Jews must end their support for organizations that support this.
The entire Zionist enterprise is enabled by influential U.S. Jewish organizations. https://t.co/b2nUceqbpE

— Rabbi David Mivasair🔥 (@Mivasair) February 26, 2023

That’s a Canadian rabbi questioning “the entire Zionist enterprise,” and putting a challenge on leaders in American Jewish community. That rhetoric is still an outlier, but I think we’re going to see this rift start to become more mainstream. It’s hard to imagine Zionism being widely questioned in the diaspora, but it clearly wasn’t supposed to develop into a far right movement that openly calls for the collective punishment of Palestinians. It’s just not consistent with core Jewish values or the political and moral outlook of American jewry. For that reason, I don’t see the old relationship holding steady, but rather a growing number of American Jews wondering if the Zionist project can be rescued from Netanyahu and the Settler Movement.

As a non-Jew, I’m deeply uncomfortable wading into those waters. Mainly, it makes me sad. I applaud efforts to stop the violence, but I can find no basis for optimism for either Israelis or Palestinians. And America and Israel are going to grow apart in a way that will be deeply painful for Jews worldwide. That’s not something I want to see, but it’s a moral conflict that is reaching the breaking point.

Like most people, I’m naturally curious about the origins of the COVID-19 virus. I would like to know if it made the leap from animals to human beings in a natural way or if it was the result of work that was being done on viruses at the Wuhan virology institute in China. If the latter, I’d like to know if it was an accident or, as inexplicable as it might seem, an intentional act. This has been a subject of intense interest for the whole world and it has been investigated by both the World Health Organization and American intelligence services.

Unfortunately, it has been impossible to get a consensus on this question.

The Wall Street Journal reports the U.S. Department of Energy has revised it’s assessment. They now believe that it’s more likely than not that the virus leaked out of the Wuhan lab. They’ve made this revision based on “new intelligence,” but they also graded their conclusion as “low confidence.” Previously, the Energy Department was “undecided,” so this is a significant change, and it’s alarming. But before you get swept up in breathless news reports or start demanding some kind of government action against China, it’s important to understand a fuller context.

A declassified intelligence report released in November 2021 previously revealed that the FBI concluded with “moderate confidence” that the pandemic began with a “laboratory accident” following a 90-day review ordered by President Biden.

The FBI still holds this view, according to the report, while four other agencies and the National Intelligence Council assess with “low confidence” the pandemic was likely caused by natural transmission from an infected animal. Two other agencies, including the CIA, are undecided.

Whether we’re talking about “moderate confidence” or “low confidence,” we’re not seeing anything that amounts to proof beyond a reasonable doubt. When it comes specifically to the Energy Department, they’ve revised their view but they’re still more ambivalent on the matter than the FBI.

Now, I have no expertise on this matter and I certainly have no access to classified information, so there’s simply no way I can take an informed position on it. What I note is that reasonable people cannot agree, and what seems consistent is that no organization that has investigated is willing to express strong confidence in its conclusions.

This is frustrating. Millions of people have died, hundreds of millions more have been sickened, all of our lives have been disrupted, and it would be nice to know if China is culpable for this, and if so to understand the nature of their culpability. Unfortunately, these are not easy questions to answer, and the “low confidence” revision by the Energy Department simply highlights this point.

If we ever do get close to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, I’m not sure how we should react. In some ways, we should be behaving as though it were a lab leak simply because knowing that it’s a real possibility, we want to do whatever we can to ensure that our own labs are not susceptible to a similar catastrophic outcome, whether through accident or an intentional act.

Assuming a lab leak, and assuming it was inadvertent, it would be nice if China admitted as much and offered to make some kind of reparations. Absent that, we’d have to be very certain before an official response was warranted, and I don’t really know what an appropriate response might be.

Only in the case of a deliberate act would I think that the world would be justified in taking action against China that goes beyond seeking some kind of redress. And that’s the main reason why my curiosity on the matter only goes so far. It’s worth noting that it’s uncontroversial that the virus began to spread widely in China, and that the main competing theory is that it originated in a food market in Wuhan where wild game was bought and sold. If that is the true explanation, it still implicates China because they allowed these markets to operate without sufficient oversight and regulation.

The fact that either explanation is plausible already tells us that we need to act to prevent future viral outbreaks from either scenario.

I am no fan of the Chinese Communist Party that rules China, but I don’t have a political axe to grind against them. I do blame them for the COVID-19 outbreak, but I can’t determine if it is primarily a matter of negligence, malice, or bad luck. I could give you a gut feeling, but we shouldn’t determine state-to-state relationships on gut feelings. I’m certainly not going to push one scenario over another based on my preference. I guess my preference is that it was a freak accident and they just don’t want to be honest about it. It’s also possible, if not necessarily likely, that they’re just as incapable of making a firm conclusion as everyone else.

So, I think it’s notable that new intelligence led the Department of Energy to revise their view more toward a lab leak, but it ultimately doesn’t change anything.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Chincoteague, Virgina scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 5×7 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Newly revised are the trees/bushes as well as the foreground and opposite shore.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

When I was in middle and high school, all the “woke” kids at Princeton University were opposed to apartheid in South Africa and agitating for American companies to disinvest there. This seemed like a reasonable position to me, and it was backed also by many of the British musical artists I admired at the time. As time went on, I began to understand that the Reagan administration’s position on white supremacy in Africa was badly hurting the United States and helping Soviet Russia win hearts and minds with non-aligned and Third World countries. It wasn’t enough to have lifted Jim Crow shortly before I was born, we needed to get on the right side of history or we’d continue to pay a heavy price.

The bill is coming due now, as South Africa is doing naval exercises with Russia and probably clandestinely shipping them weapons, too.

…South Africa has its own reasons for remaining loyal to Russia despite the risks, South Africans say. The ruling African National Congress party was backed by the Soviet Union throughout the decades it spent in exile during the apartheid era, and many of its most senior figures received training in the Soviet Union, including the powerful defense minister, Thandi Modise.

On the streets of Soweto, the vast urban settlement on the edge of Johannesburg that was a center of resistance to the apartheid regime, people say they still see Russia as an ally. “Russia was with us when we were in chains,” said Elijah Ndlovu, 51, who is unemployed. “We don’t say Russia is good by destroying Ukraine, but if you ask us where we stand in that fight, we have to be honest. We can never turn our back on Russia.”

Ever since the Israeli-Lebanon War began in 1982 and Tel Aviv shifted away from the Camp David Accords and more to de facto annexing the West Bank, I’ve felt that America has been too dismissive of Arab opinion. I opposed to Persian Gulf War despite seeing the merit in restoring Kuwait’s sovereignty, and I begged our country not to invade Iraq in 2003 without a United Nations mandate or a united Europe. I begged President Obama not to intervene in Syria (he listened) and Libya (he did not). There is cost to these decisions.

…“When America went into Iraq, when America went into Libya, they had their own justifications that we didn’t believe, and now they’re trying to turn the world against Russia. This is unacceptable, too,” [South African radio host Clement] Manyathela said. “I still don’t see any justification for invading a country, but we cannot be dictated to about the Russian moves on Ukraine. I honestly feel the U.S. was trying to bully us.”

Obviously the cost is highest in the Arab world.

The Middle East is one region where Russia has succeeded in winning friends and influence, said Faysal, a retired Egyptian consultant on organized crime who asked that his full name not be used because of the sensitivity of discussing political issues in Egypt.

“Of course I support Putin,” he said in an interview in Cairo. “A long time ago, we lost faith in the West. All the Arabs on this side of the world support Putin, and we are happy to hear he is gaining lands in Ukraine.”

“There’s been a failure of the West in the past 15 years to see the anger building up around the world, and Russia has absolutely exploited this,” Gumede said. “Russia has been able to portray Ukraine as a war with NATO. It’s the West versus the rest.”

Garret Miller of Texas was just sentenced to 38 months in the federal hoosegow for a variety of January 6-related offenses, including making threats against the life of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. His defense attorney Clint Broden thanked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols for not imposing the even harsher forty-eight month sentence sought by the Department of Justice, noting, “It should be always be remembered that, although Garret is fully responsible for his individual actions that day, his actions and the actions of many others were a product of rhetoric from a cult leader that has yet to be brought to justice.”

The identity of the “cult leader” is of course the disgraced former president of the United States, Donald Trump, who is also the front-running favorite to be the Republican Party’s candidate for president in 2024. Reporters in the court room noted no objection to Mr. Broden’s remarks. It’s become routine for January 6 defendants to demonstrate their remorse by declaring in court that they were taken in by Trump’s flurry of lies about supposed election fraud. In some cases, this is mere pretense and an effort to get a lesser sentence. In other cases, it reflects a sincere realization that Trumpism operates as a malignant cult. Either way, the point is that putting January 6 rioters in jail may be fair and just, but not if the organizers of the coup plot are never brought to justice.

Inside federal courtrooms, even courtrooms with Trump-nominated judges presiding, it’s still perfectly normal to state these truths plainly and without fear of contradiction. I find that comforting. It’s a thin reed that I cling to.

Hi everyone! It’s been another hectic week, just like all the others.

I’m in the mood for some classic Talking Heads tunes. Let’s start with one everyone knows:

“Same as it ever was…”

I know parts of the US are getting hit by some crazy weather this week. Stay safe.

Cheers!

Today’s a big day in Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has the story:

Voters head to the polls on Tuesday to choose which two jurists will compete to join the Wisconsin Supreme Court — a race unmatched in its consequence to policy in this battleground state, where conservatives and liberals are expected to raise and spend levels of cash not seen before in a judicial race.

Conservatives are defending their 4-3 majority on the court as Wisconsin Democrats seek to flip control of the court to liberal justices for the first time in more than a decade. The race comes in a year when the issue of abortion is top of mind after a dormant 19th century law banning the practice in nearly every situation has resurfaced following last year’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

It’s basically understood that the Supreme Court election will determine how the Wisconsin Supreme Court ultimately rules on women’s reproductive rights. Maybe the liberal justice wins and women’s rights are restored and constitutionally protected. But then they’ll have another election and perhaps a conservative majority will reverse that ruling.

In a representative democratic system, legislatures are the venue for writing, amending and reversing laws. The courts are supposed to serve a different purpose, part of which is determining some things which are beyond the reach of legislatures. These are rights enjoyed by the people that lawmakers cannot infringe or violate. Those rights are not up for debate.

We enjoyed a half century of abortion rights falling into this category. It was better that way. Now we’re trying to protect those rights through the election of justices. I don’t think judges should be subject to elections, nor recall. I think term-limits are appropriate rather than lifetime appointments, and certainly judges should be impeached when it is warranted. But, as much as possible, we should make clear that courts are not legislatures and it’s preferable if judges aren’t pressured by the winds of transitory public opinion.

Naturally, even when the courts are constituted through executive appointments with legislative approval, there will be ideological majorities and minorities which can shift. The conservatives are ideologically opposed to women’s reproductive rights, and that should inform how people vote. But people should be voting for governors, presidents and legislators, not judges.

I hope the liberals win a majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but it’s not right that this is how abortion rights will be decided there. For one thing, it won’t decide anything for long.

A simple Google search will quickly verify that Tucker Carlson is widely believed to be a white supremacist. The first time I called him a white nationalist in print, an editor at the Washington Monthly was concerned. It took me five minutes to convince him that I had enough to back it up. Since then, Carlson’s open racism has become more widely known and reporting on it isn’t controversial.

It’s obvious that Fox News not only doesn’t care but that they see Carlson as a wildly profitable and successful primetime talent who gives their audience precisely what it wants. But now things have gone several steps further. Mike Allen of Axios reports that Carlson is now in exclusive possession of over “41,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6 riot.”

How is this possible?

Well, Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is apparently responsible. According to Allen, McCarthy invited Carlson’s producers to visit Capitol Hill last week and “begin digging through the trove, which includes multiple camera angles from all over Capitol grounds.”

Why would McCarthy want a notorious white supremacist to have exclusive access to this footage?

I mean, the January 6 riot was rife with Confederate flags, and the breaking and entry of the Capitol building was led by well-known white supremacist groups, like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters. Does McCarthy want to try to disprove this?

Is the idea that Carlson will selectively edit the footage to paint some other story?

And, if so, why does McCarthy see this as to his advantage?

Two weeks ago, Kevin Seefried, the man who was famously photographed carrying the Stars & Bars through the Capitol Rotunda, was sentenced to three years in prison. The Trump-appointed judge called Seyfried’s behavior “especially shocking” and “outrageous, “deeply offensive” and “troubling.”  Does McCarthy think this verdict going to change because Carlson shows selective footage of the riot to his right-wing audience?

Apparently, the fact that raw footage hasn’t previously been released, except selectively by the House January 6 select committee, is of some special significance to Carlson, as if it indicates some conspiracy to spread a false narrative. McCarthy is buying into this.

McCarthy told reporters in Statuary Hall last month that he thinks “the American public should actually see all [that] happened instead of a report that’s written [on] a political basis.”

I can understand why McCarthy might make the footage available to everyone so that they can draw their own conclusions, but by giving exclusive access to Carlson, he’s clearly guilty of releasing it “on a political basis.”

And the political basis includes that he’s promoting a white supremacist’s show in an effort to somehow absolve white supremacists of their crimes, at least in the minds of a large percentage of Americans who tend to vote Republican. Is brainwashing this group a political winner when compared to the obvious criticism McCarthy will receive?

Don’t tell me McCarthy didn’t have a choice. He may undoubtedly feel pressure to release the raw footage, but he could have done that on a government server allowing all news services to comb through it, as well as the public. He went to Carlson because he wants to satisfy a narrow group.

Doing it this way makes McCarthy not only an accomplice to white supremacy but also a conspirator after-the-fact in the January 6 riot. This is apparently the required position for anyone who would lead the House Republicans.

On February 14, the White House published a fact sheet touting their record on reducing medical debt. In particular, they were pleased to note that a newly published Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) report  “shows that the number of Americans with medical debt on their credit reports fell by 8.2 million from the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2022.”

There are a number of reasons for this, including American Recovery Act money the administration has used to finance state and local programs to buy up and forgive medical debt. They’ve also changed how the government underwrites mortgages and small business loans so that medical debt is not considered, which is another way to lessen the impact of being saddled with unexpected health-related bills. It looks like the private credit rating industry may follow suit.

On the whole, though, medical debt is down because a record-low number of people are currently uninsured. And this was true even before over 16 million people signed up for Obamacare in the latest enrollment period.

One driver of this decline in medical debt is the expansion of health insurance coverage during the Biden-Harris Administration. In the first quarter of 2022, the uninsured rate hit an all-time low of 8.0%, with 4.2 million people gaining coverage between 2020 and the first half of 2022. This milestone does not yet not capture the impact of the most recent increase in Marketplace enrollment, with a record 16.3 million Americans signing up on HealthCare.gov and the state-based Marketplaces during the 2023 Open Enrollment Period. This includes 3.6 million people who are new to the Marketplaces for 2023. Since President Biden took office, the number of people who have signed up for an affordable health care plan through HealthCare.gov has increased by nearly 50%.

One reason enrollment is up is that this administration, unlike the previous one, has made aggressive use of the Navigator system, making sure to increase outreach to hard-to-reach populations.

Liberal health care advocacy group Protect our Care cited the administration’s investment into the ACA’s Navigators program as another reason for the increasing enrollment numbers. Navigators are essentially ACA enrollment advisers who are tasked with raising awareness of Marketplace plans and assist consumers in preparing their applications.

“The nation’s uninsured rate is at the lowest it has ever been in history,” Protect our Care said in a statement. “We’re finally starting to reach the true potential of the Affordable Care Act, and you see that reflected in the enrollment numbers…

A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) echoed these sentiments, saying the level of outreach had risen to an “unprecedented scope and scale” this past year.

“Enrollment outreach included investments to reach multiple audiences that experience lower access to health care. CMS has partnered with cultural marketing experts, for example, to deliver strong campaigns to African Americans, Spanish and English-speaking Latinos, and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in multiple languages,” the spokesperson said.

CMS invested nearly $100 million in grant funding to 59 Navigator organizations for this year’s enrollment period, another record amount according to the agency’s spokesperson.

You aren’t hearing the Republicans talk about scrapping Obamacare anymore. But now that they’re in charge of the House, they want to cause problems for the program.

The gains suggest the program known as Obamacare is going strong, despite repeated efforts by Republicans to kill it.

It also suggests subsidies provided to the program through two massive pieces of legislation spearheaded by President Biden had an influence. The subsidies were established by the American Rescue Plan in 2021 and subsequently extended through the Inflation Reduction Act.

“It really speaks to the improved affordability of ACA Marketplace plans. The expanded subsidies made ACA Marketplace plans a whole lot more affordable and attractive for people,” Krutika Amin, associate director at the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), told The Hill.

The potential problem down the road for the Affordable Care Act is that these critical subsidies are set to expire in 2025 and would have to be renewed by Congress in order to continue.

Both the White House and Democrats in Congress have called for the subsidies to be made permanent, but Republicans are likely to oppose those efforts.

To be clear, the Republicans know reducing the subsidies will not be popular even to their own voters. But they just don’t have the will power to finance Obamacare at heightened levels. They would need Democratic votes, and they’re not going to produce an overall spending bill that Democrats will support.

This is another reason why we’re headed to a government shutdown. Still, the Biden administration’s record on health care is stellar and they’re correct to seek attention and approval for their efforts.